111778-drop-3-delayed-but-how-much-page-2
Page 1, Page 2 Content You're right. Windows has never had any bugs and they've never released updates to fix them afterwards. | |} ---- My point was that when other software products come out they are chastised for their issues. When it comes to a game it is totally different. The player base of games treat the companies like rockstars and feel that we are entitled to play their product and *cupcake* when people complain about issues, bugs and delays...And I'm not paying a Monthly fee for windows... again it was used because how people react to software releases and the differences between the user bases. | |} ---- ---- There are very, very few programs made anywhere, from the beginning of time, that don't have bugs. Nobody likes them, but they've always been around (and everyone both is chastised for them and excused for them depending on the mood at the moment). Windows, every version, has had thousands of bugs they've had to fix and functionality they've had to modify, and they are actually very reliable as a developer. Carbine's fairly good for a game developer, but it is a new product and you'll never know how this all works once you release it to a few hundred thousand launch players all doing different things on nigh-idiosyncratic rigs. Having been to a lot of game launches, this hasn't been a bad one at all. You know that argument that football is getting more and more dangerous because players are becoming too big and too fast? I worry that's what's happening in computer program development nowadays. I don't feel like game programmers are degrading in quality, but a game like Wildstar is orders of magnitude larger than the games I played even a decade ago, much less back in my NES days. What used to be a few bugs in eight platforming worlds with six very simple controls, now we're talking about customized keybindings and player-coded UIs on top of games with persistent online worlds, played by hundreds of thousands if not millions of people and 20-30 gigs worth of code just for the client. How long would it take to make a game like that totally flawless? Especially in PCs, where it has to be optimized for a huge range of hardware combinations. I wonder if there's a time where we'll simply outrun our human capabilities. | |} ---- As much as I like this comparison, the problem here... I cannot take another version of Windows and install it.. or fix it myself or change the device.. or or or... I am so much dependent on what actual professionals are not doing (fixing it... at least not fast enough, as the declining population shows). I am not supporting the guy you commented on. | |} ---- Actually, you have other options for your OS if you want. Windows succeeds because nobody else is any better and they're simply more ubiquitous. | |} ---- More importantly - Microsoft never got a pass on any of them. And neither will Carbine. I am pleased they've figured out they don't know their own code well enough to fire things straight to Live anymore. That is a Good Thing. That kind of humility is something this crew has needed for a while. Its unfortunate that they've figured it out only after they painted themselves into a corner on the content front. No-win situations are real no matter how much we would like for ol' Tiberius Kirk to be right. Now we're just waiting to see how elegantly can they extricate themselves from this one. Using past performance as a guide, its gonna be more bleeding of the subs. A lot more. The real question isn't "when is drop 3?" its "what happens after that?" Because whether you, me or twenty-five of our closest friends adore this game to death, there is an axe hanging over Wildstar's neck and NCsoft is not hesitant about swinging it at people who can't find and satisfy a meaningful market. | |} ---- I think the difference between you and I is that I perceive the product as working, and working well. Are there issues to address? Yeah, and I'm glad they are looking at them. But right now, in its current state, I'm having a blast. I understand that not everyone is having the same experience. But I feel like I've gotten my money's worth thus far. | |} ---- ---- and surely you understand there are players that feel the opposite. | |} ---- Well yes. I thought I made that clear when I said "I understand that not everyone is having the same experience". I was giving my perception- not negating the perception of others. | |} ---- Considering that there is only X amount of players left, we don't know the value of X, but it's a very noticeable decline in the population - it could be perceived that most players don't feel that is a finished product. Especially since many bugs were reported in the beta and wasn't dealt with before the official release. | |} ---- That's making a rather large assumption that perception of finished product and people leaving are actually linked in some way. There could be a host of other reasons why people are leaving. | |} ---- Stuff happens...only human. Me personally I never expected people to walk on water I enjoy what I enjoy. I haven't made it through half of the content that is released so. But each to his own opinion. | |} ---- Don't you know, the population decline is always because of . | |} ---- I didn't say anything negating how other players or most players felt. I didn't state what others should feel. I merely stated how *I* felt. Am I not allowed to state my opinion if I am (potentially) in the minority? | |} ---- Considering the amount if feedback given on the forums in relation to bugs, it's not far fetched. I'm not saying people didn't leave for other reasons, I'm saying the game not being 'entirely ready' most likely have a big part in it. But yes, players reported a lot of bugs in the beta, which it doesn't look like you were part of since you made that account in March 2014(?), at least not for very long, many of the bugs reported wasn't dealt with as I already said. | |} ---- Well you were referring to somebody else as well with the "I think the difference between you and I is that I perceive the product as working, and working well." I can state my opinion in regards to that as much as you can, which I btw never said you couldn't. | |} ---- Right, I said you and I had a different perspective. Then you asked if I understood that people had a different perspective from mine. Which confused me because I'd JUST said that we had a different perspective. And you then proceeded to explain to me why you believe my perspective is in the minority. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to infer about my perspective being in the minority, so I thought maybe you were saying that only majority opinions are allowed here. Look, I'm not trying to be difficult, and maybe somehow we got off on the wrong foot? All I've been trying to do is give an alternative perspective because you and I are different people with different experiences, and I think all the data points are valuable. If I payed $80 plus $15 per month for a game I didn't enjoy, I'd be mad. I don't discount that experience for a second; it just isn't mine. | |} ---- Actually, I never asked a question, I made a statement "and surely you understand there are players that feel the opposite." :) I think we do got on the wrong foot though, I wasn't being very clear with my point from the start. All data is very relevant, I deeply hope this game does survive. I merely think at this point since there has/is a heavy decline in the population, Carbine should come out with more than 'TBA', especially since they promised and was proud of their 'monthly drops', which isn't going to happen anymore. They probably should allocate more resources to the game and to me, it feels like they are throwing people around in different positions too much (Carbine employees). | |} ---- ---- Committing to a date is also the number one way to: 1) emphasize that priorities need to be set and abided by 2) keep a project from snowballing out of control and/or well beyond its original scope 3) allow anyone working on said project to manage their time appropriately and enforce accountability 4) keep your customers At this point, describing the Drop 3 timeline as "aggressive" is a stretch. We also can't be thinking about "committing to a date" as if Drop 3 is the final patch of the game. It doesn't have to be absolutely finished. It just has to show significant improvement. Anyone who's still here realizes that MMOs are always a work in progress. | |} ---- Yeah, but this wasn't what everyone was saying right after drop 2. We said they should release it when it was bug free. We aren't really happy-medium people in the MMO universe. | |} ---- I disagree with all but number 4. There are far better ways to deal with scope creep and resource inefficiency than setting a deadline. Whether the Drop 3 timeline is aggressive or not is something we can't know. If they rush any part of it because they are trying to meet a deadline, that deadline is "aggressive". I have NEVER seen added pressure to a development team produce anything positive. | |} ---- The decision was that it would be released with Drop 3, which at that point was given a 4-6 week timeframe. That timeframe is all but up, and it's been getting more vague instead of more informative. Communication is the happy medium, and that's all I'm asking for. Sometimes pressure is the only thing that makes people actually produce anything. However, my point is not to say that Carbine doesn't know how to manage its development staff. Yes, deadlines have drawbacks. However, never setting a deadline is a mistake of its own. At this point, I would settle for a "goal" if we don't want to call it a "deadline"...because heaven forbid software developers be under pressure like the rest of the world. :rolleyes: | |} ---- I asked in the stream and CRB_Caydiem did mention that they do have an internal timeline. If you want them to tell us what that is, that's fine, but God forbid they still have bugs in the system when it comes up and they push it back. They caught enough Hell for that. And we did ask them to take more time to release stuff with less bugs. | |} ---- The internal timeline is pretty much all I'm asking for. That'd give some basis to decide whether or not it's worth staying subbed in the meantime. | |} ---- I have never, EVER, seen pressure producing anything good from a software development team. And Steve McConnell's book has statistical information to back this up. Yet people continue to do it (at almost every company I've worked for) and the results are predictably bad. Because managers and consumers refuse to believe that the old models of carrots and sticks don't apply when it comes to thought workers. But they don't. Good thought workers are almost universally self-motivated, though they can get side tracked. Transparency and communication yield much better results at keeping people on task than threats or rewards, which have a tendency to demoralize the workers or cause them to cut corners and make mistakes (which end up delaying the product overall). It seems that the aggressive "new content drop every month" is a textbook case of exactly this principle. I DO think Carbine could do a better job with transparency and communicating. I think doing those things better would be a lot better for the game than giving a goal date before they are ready. I've never given out a gut-level guess at a date that didn't end up becoming a hard deadline later on. They can't give out their internal dates because they would incur pressure to meet those dates, no matter how much of a disclaimer they put on them. | |} ---- You do realize that you are playing a relatively grindy MMO with lots of gold sinks, time sinks, RNGceptions and an old model that relies A LOT ON randomness and the "carrots and sticks" for motivation? I know, this is orthogonal to the question, but I don't think pressure works on software developers nor modern MMO players. If it is suboptimal for developers, it is suboptimal for the players. We all have the same psychology, we are human, so are they. | |} ---- Not super accurate. It comes down to a the difficulty and creativity needed for a task. Take doing quests for example. Assuming we are talking about the grindy quests, so you can log on press 3 buttons and do them, these are not super hard. This means that motivating us will make us better at the task. Programming software in general is not easy or straightforward, it requires creative thought. Study have shown that self motivation fosters the best and most efficient creative thought and outside motivation can even stifle creativity and self motivation. This is why many of Googles impressive ideas come out of their 10% time (like G-Mail). | |} ---- Since, ultimately, the pressure is there whether Carbine likes it or not, I feel that it's pointless to argue further about it. They'll either offer a reasonable timeline, or they'll continue to lose subs because people aren't willing to pay for time between now and when the game is fixed. That statement doesn't even need a "soon" attached to it. It's already happening. However, out of curiosity and the desire to salvage some sort of constructive discussion, what do you want them to be more transparent about? | |} ---- Dont want to push that hard on that because I really dislike these want-to-be (RL) comparisons at all but in our metaphorical world, Windows would be WoW and maybe Wildstar would be an alpha of what... Linux? I dont know. Thus, yes I have options - as usual but I want Wildstar and I think I can see what is going wrong but I cannot do anything about it, because I do not possess the financial power to buy Carbine and provide better working conditions. Still, I feel the need that Carbine employees have to rage against their management sooner or later. My only wish: I want a game in which I can really feel it is created with love and not with time pressure. I am pretty sure that financial success comes along with satisfied customers - I know Apple (if am sticking to company related examples) is proving me wrong but even they do not produce quality products as we can see with their IPhone6 + bending issues... Now and in addition, they have time pressure and have to produce quality... I mean this is somehow a worst case scenario... the pressure is more less created by the declining population. | |} ---- Exactly. Take two groups of 100 people. Give the individuals in one group the task of writing out a sentence 500 times and individuals in the other group the task of solving a logic problem. Now divide each group in half and give half the people a reward for finishing faster and the other half no reward. The group writing sentences and receiving a reward for faster work will perform better. The group solving the logic problem and receiving a reward for faster work will not, and will likely perform worse. | |} ---- I do agree that they will have to offer a timeline at some point in order to retain customers. I think the more that they can push off giving a solid date, the better quality we will see. They will have to balance quality with retaining customers. It's an unfortunate place to be in, but it's where they are. That was my point. As for transparency, at the least there are issues like the Trigger Fingers CD bug where we went a month having no idea what they were planning to do about it, or really even if they were aware it existed. That they didn't address it at all with us made it seem like it was not a high priority, even though it was having dramatic impact on us in game (my guild leader still assigns spellslinger interrupts last because he had learned to lack confidence in our interrupts during that month). From what I gather, healslingers are having an issue right now where they are not getting the feedback to know if major issues are going to be address (I don't heal, so I'm just going off what I read). I don't know about other classes. In the extreme sense, what I would consider if I were Carbine is not setting a deadline, but rather making a daily post until drop 3 detailing exactly what was accomplished the previous day and what would be worked on that day (obscuring any details that would "give away" story details or fight mechanics). Yes, this would give a LOT of fodder for people to take shots at them, but at least they would have something. At the moment, when you get a post a month about a big direction change and then nothing until another big direction change post, it feels like there's not much going on development wise and drop 3 really isn't coming. I know in my head that isn't true, but that's the perception; even I feel it. Being able to see daily progress would do wonders for the community, even if the progress isn't what the community desires/expects. That's a little bit of a crazy idea, so maybe it doesn't really work, but I would rather see the team move toward transparency for accountability to paying customers instead of firm deadlines (that we probably don't even trust anyway). | |} ---- They do seem to go silent about the strangest things. Case in point, there was one time during the beta where a dev mentioned in game that purple power cores were being added in the next beta patch. In every patch notes thread after that, I asked after the purple power cores, and I brought them up whenever relevant, since no one was finding them. Months later, after launch, during a livestream, it is casually mentioned that they aren't in the game yet, and what you see in the CX was just a teaser. In other words, the months of silence on the topic was silly, because there was nothing to be silent about. | |} ---- They are already losing customers, them keeping quiet about things doesn't help that. It creates frustration since we were originally promised one thing (monthly drops) and we get something else entirely. Imo, they are making it worse by not communicating properly and being quiet. | |} ---- Yes, I agree they are already losing customers and they've lost a lot already. That's going to happen when they don't have a date. However, they already tried the "let's commit to a date" approach with drops 1 and 2. The result was a lot of lost customers due to quality issues. Now they are taking a new approach: "we are going to wait until the quality is there and not commit to anything until we're sure". Yes, they will lose customers with this approach, but they were losing customers with the other, so the only question is which is worse. IMO, they are taking the correct approach this time. Even if they lose 90% of their customers, if they actually deliver quality on drop 3 they have a chance of gaining folks back. If they rush drop 3 and break things, it's probably over for good. I agree they could communicate more. | |} ---- Yes, I saw that in one of your posts, and that I agree with. The disagreement entered in deciding what is necessary to attain such a balance, because it hasn't been found yet. This I could support. Even vague descriptions similar to, "Oh, we've made some really good progress with Stalker AMPs this week. As of right now, here are the related patch notes: list of preliminary changes." I would even understand something like, "We ran into unexpected problems with Medic skill changes because changing A made a clear imbalance with Y, Z, so we made less progress than we'd hoped." It gives the community a better understanding of balance, lets us know that they're trying different ways of fixing problems, and still communicates that they're working on problems we care about. That would be a much better use of the Nexus Report, similar to the one on 9-16 where they went over housing changes that got more positive reactions from the community than I've seen for anything else in quite some time. It would also spread out the community feedback, instead of having a sudden explosion when the full patch notes are released, and potentially give them the opportunity to react to the feedback. If Carbine did that, by the time Drop 3 actually hits, everyone would have a decent idea of what to expect, and I think most of us would be satisfied in the meantime. | |} ---- Yeah, I'm not sure where the balance lies. And I agree it hasn't been found yet. | |} ---- Exactly. This kind of transparency would do wonders- it would make us all feel invested in the process. Because at this point we are all in this together- devs and customers. | |} ---- I do agree, they should never have come out and said they'd to monthly drops unless they could guarantee it, obviously they thought they could, but then you could question their methods for the future. Based on experience, nothing they say or come out with will matter as they can change their minds at any point. Yes they do have a valid reason for changing their minds about the drops because quality is important. I think they just don't have enough resources (people working) to actually be able to get content out in a reasonable time, that will eventually (my own guess) result in a very small portion of players being left in the game. I can't see everything working out in all fairness, the longer it takes the further away they get to actually 'redeeming' the game. I hope I'm wrong, I really do. I just don't enjoy playing MMO's when there's too few players around to be able to play the game properly, and I think this might be going that way. | |} ---- My (extremely uninformed) guess is that they aren't strapped for resources, but by code complexity and poor processes (which presumably they are taking time to fix). There comes a point where adding developers makes things take longer rather than shorter. I once worked on a team where they brought in more resources so we went from 4 developers on the project to 10. It slowed to a crawl. After a year they got rid of the other 6 developers, we re-wrote the code that had been created over the previous months, and we were able to crank the project out at a faster pace with just the four of us. I share your fears, but I'm optimistic that if enough people are still having fun and progressing through content, the game will hold enough people to build things back up after drop three. I know my guild hasn't lost anyone in the last two months, and we've merged with two other guilds, one other which seems to be just as healthy (although small) as we were. Perhaps that I've been able to keep playing with a stable group of players who have no intention of quitting the game has give me somewhat rose colored glasses (we just started x-89 and seem to be largely un-encumbered by bugs). | |} ---- They had been doing monthly releases since the December beta, and they'd been clear from the start that they would slow things down if they felt it necessary. | |} ---- I played in the beta, I can't recall any statement as such. I remember them being very proud to 'present' monthly drops. | |} ---- ---- Not even October, eh? Sounds pretty disastrous. I think even the masochists will be bored with the game by then. | |} ---- ---- It's just been confirmed that Megaservers is coming before Drop 3. | |} ---- ---- And that Drop 3 is at least 7 weeks away... | |} ---- Source: http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/state-of-the-game/ Yeaaaah, that's not gonna work out nicely, at all. | |} ---- ----